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Wednesday, May 27, 2015

There was a time that if someone wanted to call someone brutish, stupid, or whatever, they might commence to using the word "Neanderthal". (Want to maybe get a strange look from someone? Drop the -th sound and say, "Neander-tall", with the German pronunciation.) I reckon the word has fallen out of favor nowadays. Maybe it's because people have learned that Neandertals — I mean, Neanderthals — weren't the stupid things that we supposedly evolved from after all.

If you've ever spent time around good horses, you know that they're graceful, powerful, and what they're designed to do, they do well. People determined to believe that there's no creator find similarities of creatures in the fossil record and imagine evolutionary lineages — even when different critters are in the same strata. The report of a possible ancestor for horses and their kinds in India and how they migrated (plus ignoring inconvenient facts) kind of makes me wonder if they've been munching on peyote buttons.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of the “horse series” in textbooks, the origin of horses is still debated among evolutionists. Where, how, and in what order non-ruminating hoofed mammals (aka perissodactyla—like the horse, tapir and rhinoceros) evolved “is one of the great conundrums of mammalian evolution,” write the authors of a recent study reporting they found a missing link in the evolutionary story. Accordingly, the Los Angeles Times, like other news services, in November reported “Rhino horse, a ‘missing link,’ could solve 55-million-year-old mystery.” Analogous to the “sudden” appearance of diverse animals in the Cambrian explosion, perissodactyls and some other mammalian groups are mysteries, the evolutionary authors write, because they “appeared abruptly at the beginning of the Eocene across the Holarctic continents [North America, northern Eurasia, and North Africa], with little indication of their source.” The new Indian fossil, Cambaytherium, has traits similar to those in several other hoofed mammals. From the study, it is clear that the authors’ determination to view Cambaytherium as a transitional form shedding light on the horse series springs from their imaginative evolutionary worldview. Like other extinct mammals that “suddenly” appear in the fossil record, Cambaytherium is no mystery but a descendant of the kind of animals God—the Common Designer of all—created about 6,000 years ago, without evolution.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

What do you spy with your little eye? At the moment, a monitor of some sort with words and graphics on it. I spy the monitor with a compose screen and several open tabs on the browser, e-book reader, my Colt revolver, papers to file, a lamp, the window, a weird neighbor outside on the tree-lined sidewalk, and plenty more. We see many things throughout the day and take the entire process for granted. Our Creator has done a masterpiece of engineering so that we can convert photons of light into images that we can process in our minds. Was this a product of microbes-to-mule-skinner evolution? Not hardly!

Image from US National Institutes of Health

And don't let those uninformed anti-creationists tell you that the human eye is poorly designed, either. That nonsense has been debunked.We have millions of photoreceptors in each eye to detect photons. A photon is exceptionally tiny, but if one photoreceptor misses it, there are plenty more to pick up on it. Lots of photons coming in, and our mind makes sense of it all.

Suppose you are an electronic engineer tasked with devising a mechanism that can translate ordinary variations of light into useful information. But here is the tricky part: It has to work inside a living person. Your engineering instincts instantly recognize the mechanism will require multiple parts—primarily a light detector and a data-processing center—working together for a single purpose.You recall people have been sending messages to each other for centuries simply by flashing a light in a coded sequence. The people who send and receive these flashing messages must know “the code” in advance. However, light is simply a condition of nature—it is either present or it is not. It does not convey information or send instructions to organisms in and of itself. Processing data into useful information happens within the neurological center of an organism. Fortunately, the required data-processing element of the mechanism is already built into the person’s brain, saving you decades of work. All you have to do is devise a sensor to detect light and send that data to the brain. So, how would you begin your task?

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

People are used to seeing carnivorous birds, but it's a bit startling to actually see Australian rainbow lorikeets add meat to their normally vegetarian diets. This is less surprising from a biblical perspective, beginning in Genesis. I can just imagine a movie about Australian cowboys trapped in a town fighting flocks of evil rainbow lorikeets that want to eat them. "G'day, pilgrim — oi! That 'urts!" If Syfy makes the movie, I want a cut of the profits for the idea.

Pixabay / Rainbow Lorikeet / sandid

Science fiction aside, this bad boy parrot relative developed a taste for meat, even to the point of fighting other birds for it. Biblically, everything was originally vegetarian until the Fall of man.

“Meat-eating rainbow lorikeets puzzle bird experts” proclaimed the recent news headline. Rainbow lorikeets are a beautiful Australian parrot species (Trichoglossus haematodus), which have been known as solely feeding on fruit, seeds, nectar, and pollen. Their numbers in the wild have surged in recent years, much to the consternation of fruit growers (as rainbow lorikeets “can decimate an orchard in three days”), but much to the delight of backyard bird watchers in south-east Queensland, who have taken to leaving food out for them and other bird species, so as to be able to admire them feeding up close.

To read the rest of the story, click on "Easy meat for the lorikeet".
People are used to seeing carnivorous birds, but it's a bit startling to actually see Australian rainbow lorikeets add meat to their normally vegetarian diets. This is less surprising from a biblical perspective, beginning in Genesis.

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour